When Blackwater killed those 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, they called Burson-Marsteller. When there was a nuclear meltdown at Three-Mile Island, Babcock and Wilcox, who built that plant, called Burson-Marsteller. The Bhopal chemical disaster that killed thousands of people in India, Union Carbide called Burson-Marsteller. Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu Burson-Marsteller. The government of Saudi Arabia, three days after 9/11 Burson-Marsteller.
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The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC (5 March 2009)Rachel Maddow
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Who's Burson-Marsteller? When evil needs public relations, evil has Burson-Marsteller on speed-dial.
Rachel Maddow
Numbers were a mystery to me. I was so far behind. It was only in Nairobi, at age ten, that I figured out anything at all about the way time is calculated: minutes, hours, years. In Saudi Arabia the calendar had been Islamic, based on lunar months; Ethiopia maintained an ancient solar calendar. The year was written 1399 in Saudi Arabia, 1972 in Ethiopia, and 1980 in Kenya and everywhere else. In Ethiopia we even had a different clock: sunrise was called one o'clock and noon was called six. (Even within Kenya, people used two systems for telling time, the British and the Swahili.) The months, the days--everything was conceived differently. Only in Juja Road Primary school did I begin to figure out what people meant when they referred to precise dates and times. Grandma never learned to tell time at all. All her life, noon was when shadows were short, and your age was measured by rainy seasons. She got by perfectly well with her system.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Tito did not like Ceaušescu personally, because when they went hunting wild boars together, Ceaušescu cheated and broke the rules. He once took a shot at a boar, and having missed it, fired at it a second time after the boar had moved out of Ceaušescu's and into Tito's field of fire. Tito then killed the boar with his first shot, but Ceaušescu falsely claimed that he too had hit the boar with his shot. 'In that case, your shot must have gone up the hole under the boar's tail,' said Tito sarcastically. When they went hunting together again a few year later, Ceaušescu again claimed to have killed a boar when it was in fact Tito who had shot it.
Josip Broz Tito
Tito did not like Ceaušescu personally, because when they went hunting wild boars together, Ceaušescu cheated and broke the rules. He once took a shot at a boar, and having missed it, fired at it a second time after the boar had moved out of Ceaušescu's and into Tito's field of fire. Tito then killed the boar with his first shot, but Ceaušescu falsely claimed that he too had hit the boar with his shot. 'In that case, your shot must have gone up the hole under the boar's tail,' said Tito sarcastically. When they went hunting together again a few year later, Ceaušescu again claimed to have killed a boar when it was in fact Tito who had shot it.
Nicolae Ceausescu
Before the [1990 Iraqi] attack [on Kuwait], bin Laden angered Saudi authorities by making a public "prophesy ... [that] Saddam was going to invade Saudi Arabia." Sa'd al-Faqih claims bin Laden also sent "secret confidential letters to the King" about the Iraqi threat; according to al-Faqih, "he [bin Laden] was giving talks about it in the mosques. He was giving speeches in the mosques and talking about the dangers of the Ba'ath ... having ambitions to invade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. And then his prophesy was correct. And he was never respected or rewarded for that. Instead he was advised to stay in Jeddah; he was put in sort of house arrest.
Michael Scheuer
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